About Daddy (4)

Daddy seemed to like St. Paul’s writings a lot, so, he frequently quoted this saint. He’d say the important thing in life was to have a great love for people. He’d also say people needed people and that that state of humankind would never change. I agreed completely with this stance as regards love and need. The problem I saw with the ‘great love’ business was condition. I thought Daddy just could not love unconditionally even though he may have wanted to. (Maybe he was never loved unconditionally in his childhood.) For example, he found it very hard to relate socially to people who were different such as gays or lesbians, yet one of his own offspring could be in a heterosexual relationship involving adultery or fornication. If he was dismayed with the offspring, he didn’t overly dwell on it. So, it was a question of ‘giving in’ to the offspring but not to a non-relative. I’m the first person to admit how hard it is to love unconditionally, so, I can understand Daddy’s difficulty in this respect. At least at this time of my life.

The world, basically, should have been as Daddy had wanted it personally, and not as it is in reality. I guess a lot of us feel that way even though we may not freely admit it. Daddy also had conflicts with tolerance. Of course, sometimes we think the people of the state of Georgia and intolerance must be synonyms.

Daddy had many gaps in his education so that certainly is one reason for his intolerance. It seems that thongs or flip-flops became popular in the summers of the late 1950s. Daddy had been to the Orient during the Second World War, so, that could have made a difference. Nonetheless, he practically despised flip-flops, I think. I loved them and would flop them louder and louder just to agitate him. On a recent vacation, even my wife got dismayed with my flip-flops in the hot climate we were in, so, I flopped them louder and louder. This is forty years later! Truthfully, the only time I really wear anything like flip-flops now is in the house at night, never in the streets of our cool Andean capital. However, wearing flip-flops in the U.S.A. in July and August is anything but out of the ordinary!